Canada's trade minister says Canada and the EU are closing in on a digital trade agreement covering data flows, e-signatures and paperless trade, days before the Montreal summit on October 29 and 30.
Canada and the European Union are closing in on a digital trade agreement, International Trade Minister Maninder Sidhu said in a statement carried by The Canadian Press on Monday, days before leaders from both sides meet in Montreal on October 29 and 30. The agreement would cover cross-border data flows, electronic signatures and contracts, paperless trade, duties on electronic transmissions and e-commerce, with the aim of creating less friction for digital trade.
Sidhu pushed the negotiations forward in Ireland last Thursday, according to the wire report, and said Canada exported nearly $15 billion in digital services to the EU in 2024, with room to grow that figure once an agreement is in place. The talks were launched at the fifth meeting of the Canada-EU trade agreement joint committee in Toronto, and the European Commission's negotiating directives, put to the Council on September 10, 2025, say the talks should produce rules on cross-border data flows while leaving the EU's personal data protection rules untouched and preserving the right to regulate in the public interest.
The summit itself will bring Prime Minister Mark Carney together with European Council President Antonio Costa and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Montreal, and the Prime Minister's Office said on October 25 that the EU is Canada's second-largest trading partner for goods and services, worth about $178 billion in 2025.
No signed agreement has been produced, so the minister's phrase closing in on an agreement is a description of where negotiations stand, not a concluded deal, and the report rests on the minister's statement as carried by the wire service rather than on a published draft text. The Commission directives quoted in the same report set the EU's stated limits, including that data protection rules are not on the table, which means any final text will have to be judged against those limits when it appears.
A digital agreement would matter most to the firms already selling services across the Atlantic, since data-flow rules, accepted e-signatures and paperless procedures decide how easily a Canadian service can be sold into Europe at all. The Montreal summit is the first moment when the two sides could show whether the minister's assessment holds, since a deal announced there would turn a negotiating claim into a text businesses can read.